Episode 4 – Facebook, Criteo, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)

We are Thursday. Big Day. We are going to visit Facebook, Criteo and the PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). No need to present Facebook for you I guess. Let’s start with some ‘fanboy’ photographs.

In front of Facebook office

Front Door

Facebook in the news

At Facebook HQ, we met the responsible of Mobile Strategy, Henri Mois­si­nac. He is a former employee of eBay. He has been working for Facebook for 3 years. So we talked about Mobile issues :). The Facebook’s mobile strategy entails :

Smartphones

Mass Market Phones : Upgrade mobile site users to apps which enable to use more Facebook : (stronger), better, faster.

Create a more affordable offer for mobiles : Work with operators to meke FB as cheap as possible… even completely free to use

Local – place and deals : there are a lot of opportunities at the intersection Social, Local and Mobile (‘SoLoMo’), starting with places and deals. Ex : nearby places, checkin’, friends nerby, deals…

The Facebook Wall

Writing of the Facebook Wall

The Facebook Wall

Search for the 'Efex' in this picture ;)

Heni Moissinac ends with some advice for french students :

Bet on international : find a first job in a foreign country

Watch communication : learn how to speak in the US is different than in China…

Focus on impact, be speed and be bold : be ambitious and “shoot for the starsto get some dust”.

Be entrepreneurs : young, technical, scrappy

Simplify everything : the one metric view. As a French, we are accustomed to complexify everything. Stop doing that. Focus!

Criteo

We went to Criteo HQ, who arrived in the Silicon Valley in 2009. They come from France. It is unsual to see a successful European start up to move to the US and avoid to be bought back.

Criteo Logo

What is Criteo ?

Founded in 2005, Criteo provides the world leading pay per click (PPC) search expansion solution.

Criteo’s advanced technology enables online e-commerce sites to re-engage with potential customers who have left their website via dynamic banners containing the most relevant product specific recommendations that are generated in real-time for each individual. Criteo’s personalized banners significantly outperform standard display advertising and other types of retargeted banners in click-through rates and have also proven to drive increased on-site conversions and average order values. (Source : www.criteo.com)

Meeting room @ Criteo

In a word, they are the best to calculate the probability that someone is going click on a banner or not. They manage about 7 billion banners every month and also manage the internet history user. They have several data center, 2 in Europe, 2 in the USA, 1 in Japan.

What were the issues in going to the USA for Criteo ? They explained it was hard to hire locally at first. Indeed, they weren’t known at all, there were a kind of outsider. In addition, all costs added, it cost about $10 million to move to the USA.

To sum up, Criteo is create a shift in the advertising market. They propose another type of targeting. It’s the end of the impression (ie CPM). There model is a metric model. Oups, I forgot, Criteo means in Greek : « I predict ». If you want to provide Criteo’s services, you need at least 100k unique visitors / month.

Palo Alto Research Center

Parc Logo

First center for the commercial innovation, PARC is a company of Xerox, is in the business of the progress. Working in close collaboration with the world companies, the entrepreneurs, the governmental partners, PARC invents, co-develops and launches on the market innovations by combining the imagination, the research, and the return on investment for our customers. For 40 years, PARC has been in the forefront of the innovation. PARK was established in 2002 as subsidiary independent from Xerox Corporation – what allows to continue to be a pioneer in the technological changes, but on a wide range of sectors and customers today.

The companies of the whole world come to PARC to see their possibilities becoming reality and generating income. Scientific rigor, knowledge of the industry, wide portfolio of intellectual property, detailed researches are the pillars of PARC – its resources are nowhere else in a single organization. The partner companies can thus create a long-lasting competitive advantage.